🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <95@coms.fr> philip@axis.fr (Philip Peake) writes:
> ... Re: sending mail into the UK
>I don't know why any mail sent via EARN should fail.

The UK EARN gateway is brain-dead. It cannot do all the things that a
reasonable gateway like UKC does to keep the mail flowing. In my
experience, it is best to avoid using this so-called gateway.

> ... Re: UK sites who don't pay the transport costs of any mail
> received on their behalf by UKC.
>I would suggest that whoever is responsible for the .uk domain seriously
>considers the future of the .ac sub-domain, and kicks off those people
>causing the trouble - as is the case everywhere else on EUnet.

This is not possible or sensible. JANET (the UK academic network) is
provided for the whole UK academic community. That includes many Eunet
sites, but also (alas) large numbers of sites that know nothing of UNIX
and care even less. They are perfectly entitled to register in the uk.ac
(or ac.uk) domain. It is not a condition of registering in the ac.uk
domain that sites promise to pay UKC's bills. As far as JANET is concerned,
the funding and cost structure of UKC's UUCP connections is not their
problem. To them, Eunet is a private network and the people who run Eunet
are entitled to do as they please to recover their operating costs.

This is a little unfair on the people who run JANET. They actually do
support UKC's UUCP activities - providing grants for a machine and to
employ people to run it. In addition, JANET "subsidises" the UK UUCP
infrastructure by providing sites like ourselves with a cost-free 
mechanism for shunting data to and from UKC.

>Alternatively, if these sites insist that they don't need international
>communications, there could be a private .mean-bastards domain created
>specifically for them, with no entries in any maps outside of the UK.

This is also impossible and impractical. These sites-who-don't-pay-UKC
could disappear into a private domain unknown to UUCP, but they would
pop up through other networks - via the EAN, Internet and EARN gateways
for instance. The addresses would be visible in the mail headers, or
passed orally or in paper mail: eventually, they would become known.
These sites could reasonably say "why should I have to pay UKC for mail
that I can get for free if it came through the Internet gateway?". (Yes,
intra-European mail has been known to take a transatlantic detour to get
round this charging policy.)

This brings us back to the initial problem. A user in France (say) tries
to send mail one of these sites and ends up having it routed to UKC. UKC
are then left in the predicament of either passing the mail on and paying
the bill themselves or throwing the mail away.

Happily, there does appear to be a solution on the horizon. There is an
agreement in principle for JANET to fund the UK UUCP gateway on the same
basis as the other UK email gateways. (Details have still to be worked
out, so a formal announcement has still to be made.) This will mean that
UUCP mail will be free to all sites in the .ac.uk domain - the JANET
authorities will pay UKC's bill. For the UK academic community, there
soon won't be financial problems in sending or receiving mail via UUCP
through UKC.

Another possibility would be for Eunet to make the *sender* to pay the
transport costs of their mail rather than the recipient.

		Jim